I can't seem to understand why people neglect kernel versions on such updates.
I think that the right path is portage->glibc->binutils->gcc->portage->glibc->binutils->kernel+header->reboot->rest

Do this over SSH and then see how you swear if the kernel doesn't come up after reset while the server is literally "in another state"._________________Leader and Head Programmer: Epsylon, Drag[en]gine and others

Well. I seem to have finally gotten this thing updated to the current release for about everything. I had to manually update a lot of stuff from pre-compiled packages first and was able to get to where I could emerge gcc, binutils and glibc. That seemed to be the key there but before going any further I had to compile a new kernel to prevent the new coreutils from breaking the system totally. I took some notes but had to move stuff around a little trying to figure out how to get things to install in proper order.

There might have been an easier method to doing this but loosley following this I was able to get it done.

I have a similar problem, and I intend on using the above script actions to see if I can update this thing but mine is a pretty old Sparc2. It's a good box that just keeps running, but I haven't turned it on in a couple of years due to some moving and such. Now that things are in the swing again, I wanted to update and did an emerge --sync. Seemed to go ok, but emerge portage gives me this

Now that this post is more than a year old again...I have a virtual machine at 10.0 that I wasn't able to update for a while because I had to replace a processor for one that wouldn't support a 64-bit install. I 'emerge --sync'ed it and now it won't emerge portage. It gives a lot of .py errors and doesn't even show me "what will be merged". For some reason, though it was able to start when I tried "emerge -vuNDp system". Perhaps an update to the system will re-enable an update to portage? Perhaps there are some emerge options I can enable or disable to get around some default that's causing problems? I don't know why, but I don't have python-2.7. I don't know why it would be missing.

I may have to just reinstall on the vm. Hard to do from work. Of course updating the system will probably take long enough that I'll be home before trying anything else._________________Greg